Milky Way's Giant Black Hole to Eat Space Cloud in 2013

Below:

Next story in Space

The colossal black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy
will soon to get a big, tasty meal, astronomers say.

A humongous gas cloud is on a collision course for the Milky
Way's core — the home of
Sagittarius A* (pronounced "Sagittarius A-star"), which
scientists suspect is a supermassive
black hole with the mass of 4 million suns.

When the
huge gas cloud arrives in the vicinity, which it will appear
to us to do in mid-2013, it will surely be swallowed up by the
hungry black hole, scientists say.

Astrophysicist Stefan Gillessen of the Max Planck Institute for
Extraterrestrial Physics in Munich, Germany, has been observing
the Milky Way's center for about 20 years. So far, he's seen only
two stars come as close to Sagittarius A* as the cloud will.

"They passed unharmed, but this time will be different: the gas
cloud will be completely ripped apart by the tidal forces of the
black hole," Gillessen said in a statement.

The cloud is due to pass within about 36 light-hours (about 25
billion miles, or 40 billion kilometers) of the black hole. Its
speed, which is now more than 5 million mph (8 million km per
hour), has nearly doubled in the last seven years as it
approaches its doom. It has already started to shred, and is
likely to break up completely before it hits the black hole.

While black holes themselves are impossible to see — they are
objects whose gravitational pull is so strong, even light cannot
escape — astronomers can watch what happens when matter falls
into one. The areas around some active supermassive black holes
are so bright, in fact, that they are visible across the
universe.

Scientists are looking forward to the rare chance to see
something fall into our own galaxy's black hole. As it falls
nearer and nearer, the cloud is expected to heat up and release
bright X-ray radiation that should be visible from Earth.

The collision-bound cloud was discovered by a team of astronomers
led by Reinhard Genzel at the European Southern Observatory.